Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in NorwayJeff Koons Retrospective

The American artist Jeff Koons gave expression to banality in a 1988 series inspired by American middle-class aesthetics. The ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles is based on a type of aesthetic vernacular which long remained the exclusive province of royalty and aristocracy, but which today is thoroughly democratised and exploited in cheap baubles and mass-produced objects. The works which make up the Banality series could be interpreted in terms of a political manifesto for which Jeff Koons uses the art stage as a site to overturn received wisdom on good and bad taste.

The exhibition presents works from every one of Koons's series, including several recent works not previously shown in Europe, and builds on works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection's own Jeff Koons collection and items loaned to the Norwegian museum by European and American institutions and private collectors.

To accompany the exhibition, the Museum has published a catalogue featuring among other things an essay by the philosopher Arthur C. Danto. The catalogue also features a specially commissioned interview for this exhibition with Jeff Koons by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas. The exhibition will travel to the Helsinki City Art Museum from January to April, 2005.